Coaches Gone Wild

Marcos was throwing out some Alex Smith contract figures. From my understanding his guaranteed money was a little over $27 million, about $8 million of which he gets this year. So if Smith was traded, the cap hit wouldn’t be horrendous, but that’s not going to happen.

General manager Scott McCloughan ardently believes that Smith can still be productive and he may be right.

And Eastcoastniner, free agency starts at the end of February. I’ll be sprinkling in evaluations from tape and those in the know about the top prospects.

DennyPat asked about hiring Tom Rathman as the running backs coach, which is a fine idea. Unfortunately, Rathman is under contract with the Raiders.

Mike Martz – He knows his onions.

A few days ago, kmac535 asked about the Senior Bowl and I taped all the practices and the game. I’ve pouring over the tapes the last few days and the most interesting aspect of it all are the coaches wearing mics at practice.

Knapp: Granted he is a Raider, but he runs an impressive practice. Knapp multitasks better than Martha Stewart, he’s yelling out plays, down-and-distance, and instructions to players and coaches. He does it with a positive vibe and has players practicing up-tempo but controlled. Interesting that head coach Lane Kiffin was stripped of most of his authority this week. It wouldn’t be surprising if the Raiders half-hoped Kiffin would quit so they could then promote Knapp. By the way, what is it about the Raiders. A few months in that place and head coaches look like they’ve spent four years on the Russian front. It happened to Norv Turner, Art Shell and now Kiffin is looking bedraggled.

Singletary: Imagine being a college linebacker performing a drill and Mike Singletary says, “Good job.” Not only is he a legend at linebacker, he has sheer charisma that’s hard to top. He’s also very sparing in his praise and is often critical, which is OK. Defensive coaches are typically much harder on players than offensive coaches, which brings us to ….

Martz: He drilled his quarterbacks on drops, timing, and spacing. At one point, Martz the meticulous, looked over at a wide receiver before the start of a play and stopped everything. “You’re supposed to be 4 yards outside the numbers,” Martz instructed holding up four fingers, “widen out just a tick.” The receiver widened about 18 inches and then Martz re-started the play.

While demanding, Martz is almost soothing with his quarterbacks. When Hawaii quarterback Colt Brennan fumbled while getting the ball to a running back, Martz stepped in looked at Brennan and said softly, “That’s on you. That’s on you.” He then told Brennen what he did wrong.

To Martz the most important qualities of a quarterback are intelligence, toughness and accuracy. He admitted in an interview with NFL network that coaching quarterbacks is more involved because of the prevalence of the spread offense in college. Quarterbacks not only don’t know how to take a quarterback drop, but their mechanics get lazy.

Spread quarterbacks have to learn to throw in rapidly closing zone defenses in the NFL and Martz says that’s why timing is so important. If a quarterback’s knees are too high in his drop, it takes him too long to set up and it throws off the timing. Martz also said quarterbacks have to get used to reading defenses on their last two steps of their drops, something most don’t have to do in college. Martz also taught his group that drops are different depending on coverage. If a cornerback is playing back on a receiver who’s going deep, Martz instructed to take the standard 5-step drop. If the corner is playing press, Martz said to take three steps, pump, to get the corner to bite, and then take two more steps and release.

The detail was fascinating.

Tomorrow, just for kmac, we’ll start evaluating the Senior Bowl prospects, even if it is a week late.